Okay, so we had hot dogs for dinner tonight. We bought them at a store downtown and brought them home to eat. They were good. Not excellent, but good. Have you ever eaten hot dogs with a slice of green mango on them? (My guess is no, but you never know). It´s good. In the southeast of the US we eat hotdogs with coleslaw sometimes, and the mango sort of (okay, maybe not a whole lot, but kind of maybe) reminded me of that.

Another amazing thing: Here we can buy hotdogs in a package with 12 dogs. Okay, so that´s not amazing. Here´s the amazing part: we can also buy a bag with twelve hot dog buns! I´ve never understood why we buy packs of 8 hotdogs in the states and bags of 10 buns. Never made sense to me, and I am still trying to figure it out. I told the man who sold us the stuff that we were glad to have the same amount of buns and hot dogs. He looked at me like I was crazy. I guess he was right. Why shouldn´t I want that?

Anyway, be blessed in all you do…even as you try to figure out what to do with the extra buns…

Okay, so I´ve been waiting for inspiration to hit me… but is still isn´t here. However, I want to let you know we are still here and life is good!

We had a busy weekend, celebrating our 17th wedding anniversary (we remember our parents´ 17th anniversaries and they were old. How is it that we reached this milestone and are still so young?) Audra and I went and had Peruvian food where we ate ceviche (raw fish cooked in lemon juice and served with a lot of cilantro) and she had the best beef we´ve had in Costa Rica. Later we took the family to see up at the theatre. We saw it in 3-D and we were totally impressed. Things have changed a lot since we put on those red and blue tinted glasses. Sunday we went to an Ox Cart festival. They were important for the culture here before the advent of planes, trains and automoblies, and the people filled them with coffee and sugarcane to carry them to the port cities so they could be shipped off around the world.

I know this isn´t the most exciting writing you´ve ever read. We´ll work on doing better. In the meantime, click here to go to our online photo album, or click here to go to see some video of the oxcart parade (there were more than 150 carts there).

Be blessed in all you do.

Yesterday was Saturday, and so for the first time in a long time, I decided to get some things done around the house that I´d been putting off. We rent the place, so there are some things we aren´t responsible for, but there are some easy things I could do to make our time here a little nicer (as if it weren´t already nice!)

About a mile from the house is El Lagar. It´s like a Costa Rican version of Lowe´s or Home Depot, and had pretty much everything I needed. They do things a bit differently there, but one thing they do that was familiar is they put big name items on display just as you walk in so that you can easily take one to the cashier to buy it. This time they had ovens and stoves out front. I wasn´t very interested in cooking stoves so I just walked by… that is, I wasn´t very interested until I saw a particular type of cookstove on display. It wasn´t gas. It wasn´t electric. It was firewood.

Okay, maybe that´s not all that uncommon in hardware stores. There is a bit of a movement by some to get back to nature and to get off the power grid. But these stoves weren´t there for the environmentally conscious. They were there becuase in our community there are people who want to cook their meals, but who do not have the electricity (or the money to pay for the electricty) to run the stove. They make do with what they have.

Nope, I don´t think we´re in Kansas…,er, the United States any more!

Be blessed in all you do!